And, of course, those mysterious (and menacing) “brown paper packages tied up with strings.” (What exactly is in those packages anyway? Are they for that suspiciously yodeling goatherd? And what makes him so lonely anyway?)

So maybe “The Sound of Music” isn’t the edgiest show out there. And no one will ever describe it as “Breaking Bad” in lederhosen.

But it is, as ever, the beloved story of a guitar-strumming, renegade nun who enchants a family of fussily dressed Austrian kids and softens up their stick-in-the-mud father (not to mention rescues the whole lot of them from the Nazis).

Thanks to the 1965 movie, Julie Andrews is forever enshrined as Maria, the adorable convent hellion of whom the Mother Abbess warbles the rhetorical (we assume) question: “How can you hold a moonbeam in your hand?”

But before the film, there was the original Rodgers & Hammerstein stage musical ­— the fabled team’s final show together — which starred Mary Martin in its 1959 Broadway premiere.

The musical isn’t done much on the professional stage these days, but now San Diego Musical Theatre is climbing that mountain with a production directed by Todd Nielsen and featuring such local favorites as Randall Dodge (Capt. von Trapp), David McBean (Max Detweiler), Jill Van Velzer (Elsa Schraeder) and Victoria Strong (the Abbess).

And starring as Ms. Moonbeam herself: Allison Spratt Pearce, a University of San Diego/Old Globe MFA grad, veteran of three Broadway shows and lifelong “Sound of Music” disciple.

“People know Julie Andrews and the movie so well that it’s hard to stray away from, absolutely,” says Pearce about balancing the reverence for the Hollywood version with the need to keep the story vital for a modern live-theater audience.

“The beautiful thing about the stage version is that it’s so different. I remember reading it for the first time a few months ago and hearing the album with Mary Martin, and thinking, ‘I’ve never heard these three or four songs before.’

“You’re going to see what you love, but you’re going to be surprised by things you didn’t know.”

Onstage, Maria is proving not to be the easiest role to perform. So how do you solve a problem like exhaustion?

“Pacing is the key word for me for this show,” Pearce says. “In the first half-hour, I sing five songs. But it’s fun.”

It’d better be: To make her audition, Pearce had to rush over from a different theater and run a daunting gauntlet of would-be nuns waiting in the hallway for their own tryouts.